Struck by Lightning
by Kavery12
Summary: In which Dean wants something interesting to happen, Sam and an away team get into trouble and both Winchesters act like stupidly brave heroes.


I do not own Star Trek 2009 or Supernatural.

* * *

><p>The USS <em>Impala<em> was the fastest ship in Starfleet and her crew members took great pride in their ability to arrive at a destination quicker than just about anyone else in the galaxy.

Of course, this meant that they were stuck on vaccination runs a lot. Starfleet needed a case of vital medicine delivered five minutes ago deep in Beta quadrant? Doctor dropped off ASAP on the other side of the galaxy? Vital intelligence out of communications range? _Impala_ was the ship of choice.

Which was how Dean Winchester found himself floating above a new member of the Federation, a little podunk planet that had contributed a few funky crystals currently used in experimental phase technology. They were suffering from some sort of whacked out virus and the Admiralty had sent the _Impala_ to deliver antibiotics.

When they arrived two days ago, Sam and Ellen had beamed down to help out for a bit. The _Impala _wasn't supposed to stay past forty eight hours – they had another courier mission to start and Dean was counting down the minutes. From what he had been told by the Federation, the planet had plenty of doctors and the only reason the _Impala_ had been called was because the virus required a cure that couldn't be synthesized on-planet.

Bored, bored, _bored_. Alpha shift was behaving themselves (relatively), the paperwork was caught up on (damn efficient Sammy) and Bobby had kicked him out of engineering (probably trying something experimentally illegal).

Dean was considering wishing for something interesting to happen but figured if Sam ever found out, he'd bitch for months every time they ran into trouble.

Dean scribbled out the answer to the game of Romulan Hangman he and Ash were passing back and forth.

Sam was just a girl about the things that spiced up life. If Dean didn't take a few risks, they'd never get anywhere in life!

Dean wished for something interesting to happen.

* * *

><p>"<em>Requesting emergency beam up directly to infirmary quarantine!"<em> Sam's 'bad situation' voice was out in full force and Dean snapped to attention. Quarantine? That was never, ever good. He took the stupid wish back and swore to never invoke it ever again because knowing Sammy, that quarantine call was for his idiot little brother.

"Do it," he barked and bolted for the lift. A scant half minute later, he was surveying the quarantine room and while it could have been worse, Dean was having a hard time imagining said worse scenario. The entire away team looked like they were on their last legs, pale and shaky. Ellen was passed out on the floor and Sam was busy directing the two security officers in placing the ill on beds. "I need samples from everyone, medical history and the biological matter we collected down on the planet. _Now_ people, move!"

Sam had things under control for the moment but Dean could spot a hurting brother from parsecs away and Sam wasn't looking so hot, pale and sweating but holding it together better than everyone else on the team. Ellen was out for the count and that was bad. The nurses were either (sensibly) sitting down or weaving about trying to help and generally getting in the way.

"Sam!" Dean needed information and he needed it now.

Sam spun around and blinked at Dean several times in confusion.

Not good.

He'd seen Sam write the last chapter to a brilliant thermodynamics thesis puking all over the place without losing his focus.

Sam was _sick_.

"Whatever Starfleet sent down there," Sam said, clearing his throat painfully, "it wasn't a cure. It's already killed Ensign Thomas."

Son of a bitch. Ensign Thomas was going to get married in two weeks. Dean would have to tell her fiancé.

"How soon until more people start dropping, Sam?"

"I don't know yet Dean. Give me an hour and I'll have more information for you. I haven't been able to wake Ellen up so I'm going to have to figure it out on my own."

Dean scowled. "Preliminary symptoms?"

"Fever, sweating, sore throat. It progresses to coma and then organ failure."

That was all he needed to know for the moment. "Cas, get this bucket turned around! We're heading back to Earth!"

"Captain," Castiel said with deliberate punctuation. "You should be on the bridge."

* * *

><p>Dean glared at the wobbling black blob of whatever currently using the planetary communications system. Sam would know what it was. All Dean knew was it was non-humanoid, violent, had somehow hitched a ride to the planet via the <em>Impala<em> hiding in those medicine cases and now it was holding the planet hostage.

"Give me what I want and I will cure these people," the blob typed into the communication computer. It clearly lacked vocal cords and had to result to text messages.

"What do you want?" Dean demanded shortly.

The blob jiggled and Dean got the impression it was cackling evilly. Text messages weren't great at conveying emotions but the bright yellow eyes floating around in the blob definitely were. "I want the people on this planet to pay for what they did to my kind."

Dean raised an eyebrow. "Sam?" he said aloud without thinking. Sam would know what happened on the planet.

The ensuing silence was awkward.

Dean frowned but rolled onward. "What happened to your kind?" he asked and ignored the great big rock that landed in his stomach at the sight of the empty science station.

The blob shook furiously. "You don't know?" the text scrolled.

Dean sighed and tried to be sympathetic. "Sorry but no. I'd like to hear the story though, if you're interested in telling me."

Wrong answer. The blob quivered even more violently and a final text flashed on the _Impala_'s big view screen. "You have just killed every person on this planet and your arrogant little ship."

And then the blob short-circuited and killed the planetary communications system.

* * *

><p>Dean paced back and forth in the infirmary as Sam peered alternately at the computer and the bio-analysis equipment. "Sam?" he asked through the microphone.<p>

"Dean."

"Sam."

"Jerk."

"Bitch. Tell me you have a cure."

Sam scowled at his brother. "I'm a science officer, not a doctor!"

"Don't plagiarize Bones. Cure?"

"I don't have a cure yet. This thing's a bioweapon of sorts but that's all I know. It's not a virus and it's not a bacteria. It's almost sentient." Sam coughed wetly and Dean frowned. That didn't sound good. "And I'm pretty sure the blob won't help you. Technically it's a Veeria, if it's telling the truth, and the people on the planet below exterminated the Veeria some two hundred years ago after the Veeria started eating all their crops. And I mean everything – grass, trees, seeds, grain, fruit. From what I understand," Sam paused to scribble a few notes down, "the Veeria were trying to starve the natives into extinction."

Sam liked thinking out loud and right now it was helping Dean understand the blob. Understanding was good. Eliminating the threat would be better. "How did they kill the Veeria?"

Sam blinked hazily at his brother, eyes fever-bright. "Um, electricity. The Veeria are actually clouds of condensed water."

Dean gaped. "_What_?"

"They're a telepathic, microscopic species who share a communal mind and they travel in familial groups. In blobs."

"Ooookay, that's not freaky at all."

Sam laughed and coughed again. The sound grated on Dean's ears like a cheese grater.

Electricity, huh?

* * *

><p>"Calling all alpha shift to the ready room. Calling all alpha shift to the ready room," Dean dispatched over the comm and waited.<p>

The very worried members of alpha shift tumbled into the ready room like yapping puppies. They all started babbling frantically at Dean, waving wildly and Dean had to whistle sharply to get them all silenced. "You want to help Sam?" he asked superfluously and they all nodded like bobble-head dolls.

Dean leaned forward. "I need a planet-wide stun gun."

Alpha shift jabbered amongst themselves for a minute and then looked towards the violently purple-haired scientist who looked as if he had stuck his finger in an old-fashioned electrical socket. He was busy writing calculations in the air with a finger. "I think I have what you need and it'll be up and running in five."

"Good. You're dismissed. Jo, get in here! I want a security away team ready to go down on that planet in hazmat suits on my mark."

Dean was going to make that blob very sorry it ever messed with his brother and crew.

* * *

><p>Fifteen minutes later saw Dean broadcasting a planet-wide bulletin giving the blob three minutes to get in contact with the <em>Impala<em> before Dean unleashed the experimental generator that had been sidelined because of the severe electric discharge that alpha shift had been unable to eliminate from the design.

Three minutes ticked by as scans rolled in telling the _Impala_ that more and more people were falling ill with frightening regularity. Dean was caught between a rock and a hard place – the blob might hold the key to curing all the people falling ill but the blob was also the origin of the disease. Sam had determined that much and said if the blob stopped actively spreading the bioweapon, the disease would continue to spread but at a much slower rate. It would buy Sam time.

And Dean had absolute faith in his brother.

"Ash, hit it. I want that blob scrambled."

* * *

><p>"You did <em>what?<em>" Sam rasped, his voice cracking. Everyone else was hooked up to IVs, pumping saline, nutrients and various other fluids into their bodies. Out of a team of twelve, only five were still conscious and Sam looked like hell, sipping from a water bottle instead of taking the medication intravenously.

"Dude, people were getting sick way too fast. Something had to give."

"So you killed it."

"Actually, I'm not sure. I hit it at the lowest setting, kinda hoping I had just stunned it. Then when it wakes up I can threaten it again and hopefully wring a cure out of it. Wring. It's a water-thing. Ha. I'm funny."

Sam bitch-faced at his brother and then wobbled on his feet. "Sam, sit down before you fall down," Dean fretted, ignoring the itch in his palms that said he should pull open the door to the quarantine area, sickness be damned. The Winchesters were in this Starfleet thing together and that included alien bugs intent on – alarms inside the quarantine room began to whoop, jolting Dean out of his thoughts.

"Shit, I'm losing Ellen," Sam exclaimed, trying to hit buttons and administer drugs, but hypos kept falling out of his shaking fingers and he swiped at the sweat running into his eyes. The nurses still conscious tried to help but one couldn't make it out of bed and the other got caught up in a hacking fit that made Sam look positively chipper.

Fuck it.

He stepped into the airlock, sealed it shut behind him and stepped into the quarantine area.

Sam was so concentrated on saving the CMO that he didn't even notice when Dean swiped a hypo out of his hand and administered it. "What next?" Dean demanded and Sam went on autopilot, giving orders and checking readings with a desperation Dean hadn't seen since the incident that had landed Dean his captaincy.

When Ellen's vitals stabilized, Sam looked up and matched Dean's grin of relief.

Dean waited for it...three, two, one.

"Dean, what the _hell_ are you doing in here?" Sam drew himself up to his full height and glared at his brother, hoarse voice cracking as he shouted.

Dean shrugged. "Cas and Ash will scare the pants off the blob if it shows up and Jo knows what to do. The people on the ship that need my help right now are lying around me."

Sam glared some more.

Dean grinned and poked his brother. "Bed, dude. And I'm getting you your own needle. Then I'm bringing the PADD over here. You can work from there."

* * *

><p>Ash was going to kill his captain. No, Ash was going to turn his captain over to Bobby to do with as he pleased. Yeah, that was just punishment. Stupid, stupid Dean Winchester. If he had faith in his brother, why the hell didn't he trust Sam to get the cure without exposing himself to the disease?<p>

Ash was in charge. Ash hated being in charge. He was pretty sure everyone on the ship knew he hated being in charge. Why the hell did this keep happening to him? Maybe he should transfer over to the _Enterprise_ and become their computer mole.

…Nah. _Washington _would be a much better choice. Captain Gibbs might be a hardass maverick but he was the sanest of the hardass mavericks.

"I'm transferring over to the _Washington_," he announced to Castiel.

"Take me with you," Cas muttered, just as worried.

"Deal." Ash punched a button on his console viciously. Dean might think he'd just stunned the Veeria but Ash wasn't so sure. He'd seen the fluctuations that generator gave off before it combusted and yeah, alpha shift hadn't let it wind up to the max but it didn't take much electricity to fry microscopic organisms. Even sentient, communal mind micro-organisms.

Hopefully they were dead.

On second thought, hopefully they weren't. Then Ash could have an 'oops' with his omnipotent, non-regulation navigation console and they'd be _really_ dead. Ash bet he would feel loads better about this whole stupid situation after that.

* * *

><p>"Sam, come on man, just take a break," Dean pleaded shamelessly.<p>

His brother swiped at his sweat-soaked forehead and grinned wanly. "Dude, I quit and eventually you all get sick."

"You don't know that."

Sam scowled. "And who's the science officer here?"

Dean scowled right back. "Captain, bitch."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Dude, it's not like you could figure it out if I snooze away." Dean took it as a personal challenge, leaning over the computer and squinting in confusion at the diagrams laid out. He frowned in thought before clearing his throat a few times.

It had a little tickle in it. Big deal.

And Sam was staring at him with the puppy dog eyes of doom.

Great. So he wasn't feeling so hot all of a sudden. He wasn't going to drop dead inside of the next five minutes. "Sam, could this be a perversion of the Veeria themselves?" he asked, stabbing out a wild theory to try and distract his staring brother.

Sam huffed. "Don't be stup…id…" his voice trailed off and Dean watched with interest as Sam's brain went to work. "PADD," Sam said shortly and Dean passed it over. There was about five minutes of furious scribbling as Sam swayed in his chair (he'd stayed in bed for all of five minutes) before he tossed the PADD onto the desk with a triumphant thump.

"You're right. It's a 'brain-dead' version of the Veeria that tears humans apart from the inside out. You're a genius, Dean."

Dean preened for a minute. "Yeah, uh huh. So what's the cure?"

Sam threw up his hands. "How should I know? It's a semi-sentient being that is so far resisting everything I throw at it." He rubbed his eyes tiredly.

"Oh no Sammy, stay awake man, stay with me," Dean worried, carefully cradling his sick brother's face, slapping a cheek gently.

Sam snapped back to the land of the living, irritably pushing his brother away. "Stop it, I'm not going to pass out."

"Yet," Dean muttered. "Come on man, be Sam-smart and save all our asses."

Sam rallied visibly and his attention returned to the computer. A monitor behind Dean bleeped and he moved over to check it out. One of the nurses had just slipped into a coma. Shit. Dean himself was running a fever at this point and had started sipping on Sammy's cocktail of Gatorade and drugs in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.

There was a soft thump behind him and Dean whirled.

Double shit.

Sam was passed out on the desk.

Dean hoisted his moose-sized brother into bed and hooked him up to an IV before scanning the wide banks of computer screens with something remarkably close to despair. It was times like this that Dean wished he didn't have a ship capable of going so far so fast. Even if he had called for Starfleet help right at the beginning of this fiasco, they wouldn't arrive for another eight hours and by that time, most of the sick away team and all the people down on the planet would be dead.

What does a captain do when there is no enemy to chase, when the solution lies out of his hands?

Dean slumped into Sam's chair, propping his head in his hands, staring at the PADD with unseeing eyes.

The comm warbled and Dean ignored it for a minute, staring at the PADD. There was a mash of symbols from where Sam had crashed into it but before that, Sam had been brainstorming complicated things that Dean didn't understand in the slightest.

But he did understand one word – Sam had scribbled down electricity with a question mark beside it and some weirdo equation that looked more like mechanical engineering and a voltage amount than an antidote or bug-killing drug.

The comm warbled more insistently and Dean punched it with a curse. "What?" he asked sharply.

"Sir," Castiel reported with strained excitement, "sir, people on the planet are getting better!"

Electricity.

Sam had figured it out after all.

Dean scrambled to plug in the correct variables. Ellen first, before she got too weak to withstand the charge. Then Sam, then the team leader, then everyone would be saved.

But what would deliver the necessary charge? He scanned the quarantine room with minor desperation. Defibrillation units had gone the way of the dodo years ago. He ripped apart an innocent PADD with the multi-tool he carried everywhere with him, pulling contact pads from one of Ellen's experimental brain scanner doo-dads. Then Dean slapped the monitor from said doo-dad into his mad-scientist experiment, remembering at the last minute to rewrite the gauge so it monitored voltage instead of EEG.

Then he surveyed the device. It looked like a kid's attempt at building a PADD – wires sticking out, screws jammed into places they weren't designed to go and a power source that could easily kill someone if Dean hadn't assembled it correctly.

He ran it through a few tests and when everything seemed to be working properly, he attached the pads to Ellen's chest. Dean filled out the equation with Ellen's health data, spent a brief moment hoping he and Sam hadn't accidentally wired the thing for HBO in their delirium (his own fever was somewhere around 103°F) and hit the button.

Ellen's back arced up off the bio-bed as current arced through her sick body and Dean bit his tongue so hard he could taste the copper tang of blood. He'd either just killed his only mother-figure or saved her life. The bio-bed screeched in protest, the life support systems automatically compensating for the surge in power and administering the correct calming drugs. When Ellen seemed to stabilize, Dean pulled the pads off and turned to Sam. He couldn't afford to wait and see if it had worked and she was still alive so he counted that as a plus.

Grim-faced, he pushed a significantly higher charge through his brother, hearing the whine of electricity and the squeal of bio-bed circuits. He didn't even know if Sam could feel it or not. He was praying Sam couldn't – Dean wasn't just zapping people with your average stun voltage.

He worked his way around the room and then parked himself at his brother's bed side. "Come on, Sammy," he breathed. The insulted bio-bed spat readings back at him over the period of half an hour. Sam's temperature was dropping and the count of foreign organisms in his body was shrinking rapidly as the immune system regrouped. Dean updated Ash and Castiel as soon as it seemed like Sam was going to come around and a nurse sat up, blinking blearily.

She tottered to her feet and started checking monitors as Dean filled her in. "Commander Winchester," she breathed in tones usually reserved for angels. "He's a genius. The electricity gave the immune system time to regroup and now antibodies are being developed naturally. We'll be immune."

"Oh good," a groggy voice said from somewhere around Dean's elbow.

"Sammy!" Dean crowed happily.

"It's Sam, j'rk." Sam pushed himself up to a sitting position and blinked around the quarantine area. "Ellen?"

The nurse skittered over to the CMO's bed. "Still stabilizing. It looks like she got hit the hardest after you, Commander. I don't know how you held out that long."

Dean was nodding happily. This was all good, it was all good, the room was spinning, why was the room spinning?

Dean hit the floor, unconscious before his head cracked off the bio-bed base.

* * *

><p>Sam was ready to kill his hard-headed brother.<p>

Stupid, stupid, stupid Dean. So caught up in saving everyone that he forgot to save himself and now he was passed out on his own bed, getting his own shock of electricity and a rather haphazard dermal regeneration where he'd split his forehead open on the bio-bed.

Sam hobbled around the quarantine area. Now that his head was clear of fever, he could ignore the pounding headache (dehydration, exhaustion and lingering effects of mild electrocution) and focus on scanning for the micro-organisms that would keep the quarantine area contaminated. He really hoped he didn't have to zap the whole ship in an attempt to kill off the organisms. It would make life difficult.

He was buried in scanner recalibration when Dean woke, sitting bolt upright and then clutched his head like it was going to fall off. "Ow," Dean groaned.

"Serves you right. You aren't Superman."

"Damn straight I'm not Superman. I don't wear red underwear outside my clothes and I'm not a glasses-geek. Clearly I'm Batman from that badass Christopher Norton remake."

Sam wrinkled his nose. "That old one? Seriously?"

Dean glared at him, prodding the raw cut with his fingers. "Don't diss the classics, dude. He drove hot cars, had cool tech and bought hotels to go swimming in. What's not to like?"

Sam rolled his eyes and turned back to his scanner work. A minute later, a warm hand clamped down gently at the base of his neck, Dean leaning over his shoulder. Dean wouldn't hug him or start a chick-flick moment but Sam had been through enough freaky situations with his brother to know that Dean wanted to reassure himself that Sam wasn't just some wishful figment of his imagination.

"Can you find the buggers?" Dean asked.

Sam glared at his tiny nemesis. "Oh yeah. Totally. But I think we'll only have to do the transporter and the quarantine room. If they don't find a host, these mutated versions die within thirty minutes. I'll get them all."

So Dean sat beside Ellen and watched Sam bully the computer systems into telling him what he wanted to know. "Dean?" Ellen asked fuzzily an hour later.

"The one and only," he grinned, weak with relief. "How's it going, gorgeous?"

She slapped his shoulder weakly. "You're only saying that because I don't have a hypo in hand." Dean shrugged but rolled out of reach just in case. "Chicken," Ellen laughed.

Sam rolled his eyes at the incorrigible pair as he raised quarantine. "We're clean," he announced. "Now we just have to check on the planet."

* * *

><p>Some twenty four hours later, Dean was sitting back in his captain's chair, everything right in the world. He stared out at the empty bridge, thinking. When Sam had found out that the Veeria had indeed just been stunned, he and alpha shift (who were a very angry bunch at the moment - a hostile had messed with their commander AND their captain) had devised an electrical cage to enclose the whole communications building, leaving the Veeria to pinwheel around the containment, howling in frustration.<p>

If it were up to Dean, the cage might suffer an 'accident' and overload, killing the Veeria. Ash would help in a heartbeat. But a Starfleet prison ship specializing in non-humanoid transport was arriving in twenty minutes and every crew member except poor Ensign Thomas (who had had a mild cold, Ellen explained sadly, and that had compromised her too much) survived.

The people on-planet had a slightly different ending. The electric pulse that had carried over the entire planet was strong enough to kill any sick elderly or children. The death toll was high, too high and Dean was going to willingly accept any repercussions for his actions. But Starfleet had taken a look at the situation and saw things in a sensible light for once. The planetary rulers had wanted to try the _Impala_ on charges of mass murder but the Admiralty had simply shrugged and asked the planet if they would prefer that the _Impala _leave all of them to die.

While Dean was grateful that his kooky crew wasn't in trouble, he couldn't shake the fact that he had issued an order that had killed a percentage of a planet's population. Whether or not he liked it, that made him a mass murderer.

The label wrapped around his chest like a binding boa constrictor and he bowed his head, staring at his PADD.

A big hand whacked him upside the head. "Stop it," Sam ordered brusquely.

Dean glared at his brother, sputtering in indignation. "What?"

"You heard me. Keep it up and I'll bring out the chick flick moments. Ellen will help, she's busy beating herself up over passing out and leaving me to muddle through the problem on my own. Hell, I could beat myself up over Ensign Thomas."

"You couldn't possibly have saved her!"

Sam stared levelly at Dean. "And you couldn't possibly have saved everyone on that planet. Yeah, it's possible that people are dead because of you. But people are also alive because of you. How do you weigh that out?" When Dean didn't answer, Sam continued. "You can't. You can't possibly determine how much a human life is worth. So all you can do is your absolute best, respect the decision you made whether or not it turned out the way you wanted it to and move on."

Dean shrugged. "Doesn't make it better."

"No. It doesn't. But this ship needs its captain. They're all a little rattled, especially since it seems their command team almost died. Ash isn't happy with you, dude."

Dean was tempted to childishly make a face at his kid brother. When had the twerp grown so wise? "Fine. I get it." Sam grinned wide as a slice of orange and the moment evaporated. Sam, wise? Nah. He was just a giant girl. "Fine, drop the chick flick stuff and let's go race off to Gamma 6-C31. Maybe we'll run into _Enterprise_ along the way."

Bellowing for his bridge crew, Dean waited until the prison transport arrived, sent them a cursory note of greeting and then the _Impala _flashed off at warp speed, leaving trouble and heartache far, far behind.


End file.
